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Appeals court affirms Devin Nunes’ loss in defamation suit

homesafetytechpros — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 07:16:48 +0000

Former Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., applauds in the audience as former President Donald Trump announces he is running for president for the third time as he speaks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

A federal appeals court in Iowa handed Devin Nunes another loss in his defamation suit against journalist Ryan Lizza and Hearst Magazines over a 2018 Esquire article that said the Nunes family’s dairy farm knowingly employed undocumented immigrants after a lower court judge determined that the story was “substantially, objectively true.”

A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit on Monday affirmed the lower court’s ruling which granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment, reasoning that the former Republican congressman-turned-Truth Social CEO and his family’s dairy farm failed to provide any evidence that the article caused monetary damage.

The former California congressman, who has waged numerous unsuccessful (so far) lawsuits over the years — perhaps most infamously against the Twitter accounts Devin Nunes’ Cow and Devin Nunes’ Mom — first filed suit against Lizza and Hearst in September 2019. The complaint alleged that Politico’s Lizza, then an independent contractor reporting for Esquire, defamed the congressman with actual malice and conspired to publish the “hit piece” headlined “Devin Nunes’s Family Farm is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret.”

A second defamation lawsuit was filed on behalf of the dairy farm itself, NuStar Farms, Anthony Nunes Jr. and Anthony Nunes III, Devin Nunes’ father and brother, on Jan. 16, 2020. The cases were consolidated in February 2022.

The plaintiffs attempted to show that it was defamatory of Lizza to write — and for Esquire to publish — that the Nunes family, which “owned and operated a dairy farm in Tulare, California for more than a century,” had “knowingly” employed undocumented immigrants, despite then-President Donald Trump’s hard-line stance on illegal immigration and the then-GOP congressman’s support for Trump and his immigration policies.

In the lower court ruling, the presiding judge found that Nunes and the farm likely knew that at least some of the farm laborers were not legally in the country.

“Despite the fact that NuStar plaintiffs legally needed to obtain verification from prospective employees through unexpired documents, they accepted expired cards, at least some of which explicitly stated when they expired,” Williams wrote. “For instance, the state identification card one worker presented to them had an expiration date on it, as did some of the resident cards and permanent resident cards.”

In affirming the lower court’s ruling, the panel reiterated that Nunes had claimed the article “impaired his future career opportunities, impacted his ability to raise funds, and damaged his election campaign for Congress in 2018.” However, the court then emphasized that Nunes won his 2018 reelection campaign and accumulated more than double the amount of money from donations in the two years after the article was published (over $26 million) than the two years prior to its publication (nearly $13 million).

The court further found that the Esquire article didn’t appear to harm Nunes’ employment prospects.

“Nunes also failed to present sufficient evidence that the article impaired his prospects for employment,” the ruling states. “The only evidence regarding Nunes’s employment shows that after he retired from Congress, he became the chief executive officer of Trump Media & Technology Group, Corp., with a starting salary of $750,000. The job, Nunes admits, was secured ‘based on the strength of Congressman Nunes’s reputation.’ Nunes thus did not produce evidence to support his allegation that he suffered economic loss as a result of the article.”

The panel similarly tossed the dairy farm’s case, noting that the establishment also did not provide the court with any proof that it suffered financial or reputational losses aside from claiming that one unnamed person stopped doing business with the farm as a result of the article.

“But the NuStar plaintiffs failed to produce evidence that the suggested business relationship existed, let alone that the other party discontinued the association. This bare assertion of lost business is insufficient to establish a cognizable injury,” the panel wrote. “Because they presented no evidence of a preexisting good reputation that could have been damaged by the article, the NuStar plaintiffs failed to create a genuine dispute for trial about whether they suffered a cognizable injury.”

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Devin Nunes’ lawsuit against Washington Post finally over

homesafetytechpros — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 17:19:56 +0000

Trump Media & Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes is seen outside the U.S. Capitol July 26, 2023 (Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images).

After Republican former U.S. representative for California Devin Nunes‘ long-running defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post suffered a damaging blow in June when the trial judge tossed what was left of the case, it seemed that he was prepared to avail himself of the appellate process to the end. A notice that hit the D.C. Circuit docket on Tuesday confirmed, however, that the case is permanently over.

Lawyers for Nunes and the Post have agreed to cover their own costs in an agreement that the case be “voluntarily dismissed with prejudice,” meaning it cannot be brought again.

The defamation case arose just a week after the Post published Ellen Nakashima’s Nov. 9, 2020, article “White House official and former GOP political operative Michael Ellis named as NSA general counsel,” telling of the then congressman’s reported 2017 “midnight run” and attributing statements to Nunes that the Obama administration “spied” on — wiretapped — Donald Trump and his associates in Trump Tower.

Nunes had countered that he “never made the ‘baseless’ claim – or any claim – that the Obama administration spied on Trump Tower” and that he instead “said the exact opposite – that there was no evidence of any wiretap on Trump Tower.” The former House Intelligence Committee chairman said Nakashima should have known his stance on the issue because, in the course of her own reporting from 2017, she wrote down notes with his denials. He also asserted the so-called “midnight run” — through which he “was given access at the White House to intelligence files,” as Nakashima’s report put it — did not actually occur under the cover of darkness.

Though the Post moved to issue a correction, Nunes claimed the fixes defamed him too, only slightly shifting language from “intelligence files that Nunes believed would buttress his baseless claims of the Obama administration spying on Trump Tower” to “intelligence files that Nunes believed would buttress Trump’s baseless claims of the Obama administration spying on Trump Tower.” That revision didn’t stop giving readers the impression that Nunes believed the wiretapping theory, he said, so he moved forward with a lawsuit for nearly four years.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, presided over the lawsuit after it was moved from Virginia state court to federal court in Washington, D.C., where, as recently as June, he granted the Washington Post’s motion for summary judgment. In one part of the ruling, the judge noted that even though Nunes had as early as 2017 said “[w]e know there was not a wiretap on Trump Tower,” his suggestion that it was possible “other surveillance activities were used against President Trump and his associates” worked against him.

“Here, the Court concludes that a reasonable jury could not conclude that the correction was materially false. After all, as Defendants correctly contend, the record demonstrates that Nunes’s public statements in March 2017 after the White House visit had ‘provided some credence to Trump’s concerns,”” Nichols wrote. “It was therefore not materially false to say that Nunes’s comments in March 2017, as reflected in public reporting around that period, were directed toward bolstering President Trump’s claims (even if baseless) about wiretapping ‘by comparing it to other potential evidence of Obama administration surveillance of Trump or his associates.’”

The judge also concluded that Nakashima “simply made a mistake” — an “honest mistake” even — when she didn’t remember Nunes’ 2017 denials when writing the article in question three years later.

Currently, a correction does show prominently atop the article relaying Nunes’ account of what took place:

Correction: As originally published, this article inaccurately attributed claims that the Obama administration spied on Trump Tower to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), rather than to President Trump. Nunes has stated that he did not believe there had been any wiretapping of Trump Tower. This article has also been updated to note that Nunes says an incident known as the “midnight run” took place during daylight hours.

Law&Crime reached out to attorneys of record for Nunes and the Post on the ending of the lawsuit.

Read the dismissal notice here.

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